Chambers

New BBC sitcom on the work of barristers. The first episode was very funny and contained such hilarities as a multi-million pound building case being charged per box file, and the opposing barristers betting each other that they can't get particular words into their speeches without the judge noticing.

It achieves this by omitting all illustrative quotation, and paring the senses and shades back to the briefest of mentions. It does not omit shades of meaning, but they zip by very quickly. A typical entry reads

and so on and so on, so if you have a crossword where the answer is some kind of barrel perhaps, but the only word that fits is MONKEY, a quick scan of Chambers reveals that there is such a thing.

It was originally published as Chambers's Twentieth-Century Dictionary in Edinburgh in 1901, and it retains a characteristically Scottish cast in some respects. (The indications of pronunciation sometimes try to cover too many varieties of British English; it clearly wasn't done in London or Oxford.) The name of modern editions is Chambers, no longer Chambers's.

It is also famed for a few of its jokes: éclair, a cake, long in shape but short in duration, with cream filling and chocolate icing; double-locked, locked with two locks or bolts: locked by two turns of the key, as in very few locks but many novels.